GREAT MARKETING BUT MAKING NO SALES? YOU NEED TO READ THIS

GREAT MARKETING BUT MAKING NO SALES? YOU NEED TO READ THIS

If you’ve invested hard earned money into your marketing, it can be incredibly frustrating to have a poor sales conversion. As a Business owner, you no doubt see an investment in marketing as an investment into yourself, and as traffic increases and the PPC average costs drop, its easy to believe they’re on a surefire path to success – But then, no sales. Ouch. What’s going on?

Firstly, Take A Step Back And Take A Look At Your Timeline – And Your Funnel.

Some types of marketing are more instantaneous than others, depending on where and how your marketing investment is placed. We all want to believe that our brand will be the next one to take off overnight, but the reality is this: Even “overnight” successes often have years of trials, and failures behind them.

With new brands especially, marketing needs to be a tool not only for conversion, but also for brand awareness. No, “brand awareness’ is not a cop out term for poor performance, but more importantly refers to the idea of your brand becoming known and trusted – the essential first touch points of any marketing funnel.

Awareness is the first step, as implied, for a customer to know of your brand. At this point, they are becoming aware of not only your name, but your offerings, your products and your tone of voice and visuals. With this, a customer can make initial decisions: Is this brand reflective of my values? Do the products fulfill a want or a need of mine? Do I aspire to be like this brand?

At this stage in the customers journey, marketing tactics including SEO and SEM, content marketing and email marketing are common tools that prove effective.

Consideration is an exploration into your products or services. At this stage, the consideration of your product may have true intent to purchase behind it. The customer is ready to learn the nitty gritty about your offerings, and how these can be applied to their specific want or need. Here, a customer is also comparing what you have to your competitors, tossing up price points, attributes, pros and cons. It’s an essential step in the funnel that can take time if depending on price point, industry or competition.

The awareness and consideration points are where leads are generated and then qualified. As digital marketing becomes a more competitive space, an investment into your brand awareness not only allow you to discover further audiences and opportunities, but also develops an interested audience that can be re-targeted, and encouraged further down that marketing funnel with even more effective touchpoints. This takes time and experimentation, and teaming up with professionals at this stage is a great idea to ensure your investment is generating true leads.

Are Your Leads Landing In The Right Place?

We could bang on about web design, and the User Experience (UX), but that’s a whole blog in itself. The brass tacks are these: It is essential to have a website designed for sales. If you’re placing too many steps between a customer landing on your website and purchasing a product, your customers will be frustrated and navigate away – and probably go and purchase from your competitor.

Landing your leads on a purposefully created landing page is a critical part of stepping up your sales conversion odds. Here, the customer can find the exact info they need in a single page, that is designed for a fast checkout, tailored to the message you’ve created with your marketing campaigns.

For example, a marketing campaign dedicated to highlighting the technical qualities of your product should land on a page where the customer can learn more about that quality. By reinforcing the messages that have brought your customers into the funnel, they are more likely to proceed to a sale with full confidence.

Am I Focusing On The Final Step?

The work doesn’t stop once we’ve acquired those interested customers. Now is the make or break point, where marketing truly develops into sales. Depending on multiple factors, including your industry and price point, your sales tactics at this level are about discovering key data on the timeline of your conversions.

For example, a luxury accessories brand may struggle to make a single conversion during that first experience on the brands website. Their journey through the consideration period is usually slower, as the price point dictates the customer to really get to know the brand better before they part with that larger amount of cash. A customer might then need another visitation to add to cart. And from there? Maybe another to actually hit that Buy button. Rather than feeling powerless in this space, there are plenty of sales tactics we can explore

Abandoned Cart Solutions – If your customer has logged in or set up an account, they’ll have given you an email address. We can then create an automation system that reminds the customer via email about their cart. Explore email layouts, content and offers to discover what gets that Abandoned Cart into a Checked out cart – You might be surprised by what works.

Retargeting through PPC – With correctly installed Facebook and Google Analytics Pixels, we are given a powerful opportunity to keep that customer in the sales funnel without starting all over again. Pixels place a cookie on your web page that collect basic data from the people visiting your page (Concerned about privacy issues post GDPR? We love Conversio’s free Cookie info tool). With this, we can create remarketing strategies that keep your brand top of mind. Retargeting can even laser focus in on activities related to pages visited, pages that weren’t visited, and even products placed in the cart. You’ll see this tactic used a lot with the big e-commerce brands, who have their retargeting game locked down. Why? Because it works

Am I Solving A Problem, Properly?

At the end of the day, products are designed to fulfill a perceived need. Some needs might be linear (I need food that fills me up but has flexibility, so I’m going to buy a loaf of bread) while others might be a bit more emotionally or ego driven. Step back and view your product for both the things it adds, and the issues it removes.

How we position a product impacts four key areas: Product, Price, Promotion and Placement.

A well positioned product or service is one that recognises competitors and opportunities. If your new brand is introducing itself into a highly saturated market, you need to be prepared with a clever marketing strategy, a recognised niche, and a brand voice that truly sings.

Likewise, an innovative new product that offers a clear solution to an issue may struggle to find conversion. Either the innovation is too new and needs time to become adopted (Learn more about technology uptake here) or the positioning may not be correct for the targeted demographic. A common household product that is expensive, available exclusively online through a mandatory subscription set up, and recreates their tone of voice every six weeks will never do well, regardless of how great the product is.

In Summary:

Your marketing endeavours do not have the final say on your conversions if your sales endeavours are abandoned, under developed or unconsidered

Marketing is about the top level funnel areas of awareness and consideration, acquiring leads and qualifying them for the next step down.

A well created landing page increases your chances of creating a conversion by offering your customers exactly what they wanted to see when they clicked through.

Strengthen that conversion rate with some key sales strategies that keep your audience coming back

Tailor Group is a full service creative marketing agency, specialising in fashion and lifestyle brands. If you’re ready to take your brand to the next level – and gain those highly qualified leads you’ve just heard so much about – why not reach out to us for a free, no obligations conversation?